Aboriginal Language Teachers

• The article highlights the work of four Aboriginal language teachers in the International Year of Indigenous Languages (2019).
• The teachers' work requires a wide range of skills due to language loss and the minoritization of their languages in education.
• Each teacher operates in a unique language ecology, impacting access to speakers and resources.
• The article celebrates teachers' achievements and outlines the challenges they face.

Key Words

• The key words in the article are: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, Australian Indigenous languages, language ecologies, language revival and maintenance, languages teachers, languages and cultures teaching.

Introduction

• The United Nations declared the International Year of Indigenous Languages (2019)
• The year aims to acknowledge Indigenous languages' significance and raise public awareness about their role in enriching cultural diversity.
• Language preserves community history, customs, traditions, memory, and unique modes of thinking.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers teaching the languages of the Australian continent hold a special position.
• The article discusses the teachers' roles in school programs, community-based work, language research, and resource development.

Article Focus

• The article focuses on how the teachers' work varies according to their specific language ecologies.
• Factors influencing their work include: the history of language uptake in educational settings, available teaching and reference materials, and the extent of accessible professional support.
• United in their views on the profound connections between their respective languages and Country, cultures, and identities despite contextual differences.

Article Outline

• The article first provides background information on Australian Indigenous languages and their ecologies, curriculum and resources.
• The context and work of Carmel Ryan on Arrernte in Central Australia are provided.
• Information about Marmingee Hand on Kriol, Walmajarri, Gooniyandi and Bunuba can be found.
• Details about Nathan Schrieber on Gunggay in Far North Queensland are provided.
• The context and work of Michael Jarrett on Gumbaynggirr on the New South Wales mid-north coast are outlined.
• The article concludes by drawing out similarities and contrasts in experiences.

Aboriginal Teachers Background

• Aboriginal languages teachers identify as Aboriginal, encompassing peoples of mainland Australia, Tasmania, and other islands apart from the Torres Strait.
• The term 'Torres Strait Islander' refers to people from the islands and seas of the Torres Strait.
• The generic term 'Indigenous' is used when referring jointly to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and cultures.
• The terms 'Australian' and 'First' are used to acknowledge the rightful place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
• The "plural" form of language is used as an explicit acknowledgement of the diversity of Australia's first peoples, their languages and cultures.

Language Ecology Defined

• Refers to the constellations of languages and the extent they are used in a given locality.
• Earliest notion associated with language planning and the roles different linguistic codes play in a society.
• The grounded concept serves as a practical and meaningful heuristic for discussing the teaching of First Nations languages.
• Focuses attention on the presence of multiple languages and proficiencies.
• Highlights the variability of these elements and/or their configurations from place to place.
• A 'language ecology' can be compared to an 'environmental ecology', but it is languages, and not elements of the natural environment, that are configured differently in each location.

Language Ecology cont

• Common Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language ecologies can be categorized broadly: predominant type of language spoken by Indigenous residents as their first language.
• Their first language (i.e. mother tongue, acquired from birth) is a Traditional Language, a New Language or a variety of English
• Individuals acquire their language repertoire from the specific language resources which accord with those in their language ecology type
• Opportunity and context allow certain situations

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Language Ecologies in Australia

• The work of Aboriginal languages teachers responds to their respective language ecology.
• Their work responds to both the target Traditional Language and often also the medium of instruction that these teachers share with their students.
• The article focused on the teaching of Traditional Languages in their respective language ecology
• Ramifications for students' basic right to an education that derive from the local language ecology, including how classroom learning is delivered to students who do not speak English as their first language.

Traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages Overview

• Languages spoken since before invasion and colonization.
• Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language programs in schools typically involve a Traditional Language, rather than a 'New Language'.
• Nowadays, Traditional Languages are also commonly known as 'First Languages'.
• Both 'Traditional Languages' and 'First Languages' unambiguously refer to the original languages belonging to different First Nations.
• They also explicitly contrast with the New (contact) Languages spoken by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in some areas of northern Australia.

Traditional Languages in Australia

• Estimated numbers of pre-contact Traditional Languages vary, but are considered to have been around 250 distinct languages.
• Named varieties, such as dialects and clan-based varieties, may be two to three times that number.
• Traditional Aboriginal Languages are not mutually comprehensible, nor are Traditional Torres Strait Islander Languages.
• Australia- a large language family, called 'Pama-Nyungan', that includes many of the Traditional Languages
• Despite these languages being closely related, they are not mutually comprehensible.
• The Pama-Nyungan language family stretches from the western Torres Strait in the north-east across much of the Australian.
• The language family excludes most of the Top End and the Kimberleys to the furthest south-western corner.

Complexity of Langauges

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Traditional Languages are grammatically highly complex.
• Traditional Languages in the Pama-Nyungan language family are characterized by the use of inflectional suffixes.
• Suffixes like used in Latin, with case-marking showing the various roles of noun groups in a sentence such as agent, object, location, goal, beneficiary, source, instrument, etc.
• Verbs typically also take suffixes to show tense, mood and aspect information.
• Languages in the school programs discussed in this paper, Arrernte, Walmajarri, Gunggay and Gumbaynggirr are Pama-Nyungan languages.
• Non-Pama-Nyungan' language families have fewer members, and are all located in northern Australia, from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Kimberleys.
• Non-Pama-Nyungan languages are also just as complex, indeed many are polysynthetic with long words, composed of many parts, that are able to express an entire English sentence.
• These non-Pama-Nyungan language families also make a greater use of prefixes in their grammatical structures.
• Non-Pama-Nyungan languages: Bunuba and Gooniyandi

More on Langauge

• Teaching any Traditional Language in settings where it is not acquired from birth as a mother tongue/first language clearly requires explicit teaching of grammatical features
• Programs factor features into their planned teaching sequences.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages have long oral traditions.
• Most have developed writing systems for their languages may come as a surprise.
• It is not uncommon for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages teachers to be fluently reading and writing their languages in the course of their daily work.

Spoken Traditional Languages

• The extent to which Traditional Languages are spoken by their speech community depends on their historical and present experiences.
• In some situations, communities are working with historical and 'rememberer' sources to reawaken their Traditional Languages
• younger community members are working with older speakers to ensure their Traditional Language knowledge is passed on
• every community member speaks the local Traditional Language with each other and it is the first language children learn as babies
• diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language backgrounds
• community members are affiliated with other languages and areas though there will be a local Traditional Language for the particular country of that community

Summary of New Languages (Contact Languages)

• 'New Languages' are those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, such as creoles and mixed languages, which are spoken in many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speech communities.
• They have a very different history to Traditional Languages as they have developed through processes of language contact and a community-wide language shift.
• Roots in Australia's contact history; New Languages show influence from various source languages, including English and Traditional Languages.
• differ from them at all linguistic levels and are not mutually comprehensible with them

Recent Recognition

• New Languages such as Kriol and Yumplatok (also called Torres Strait Creole) have a long-term trajectory of recognition.
• These New Languages are spoken widely and each is estimated to have over 20,000 speakers.
• Much of their vocabulary is historically derived from English, so they are categorized as 'English lexified creoles'.
• New Languages: Kriol and Yumplatok, their grammars have been described linguistically and their history is recognized.
• New Languages: print-based resources in their own orthography (writing system) and they have standardized names.
• Interpreting services have been established in both these languages

New Languages Cont

• Other New Languages, such as Yarrie Lingo or Lockhart River Creole have a different trajectory of recognition.
• Incomers and locals still might wonder if they are "proper" languages, because they are only inconsistently acknowledged, for example in school or by other services.
• They are often in the early stages of being represented in print and are widely known through their standardised nomenclature
• Mixed languages a blend of a single Traditional Language with elements from a creole or English: Modern Tiwi, Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol
• Like every language, these New Languages express the identity, history and culture of their speakers.
• New Languages are not typically taught through the mechanism of the Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander languages curriculum

New Languages Cont

• Traditional Languages have an inherited cultural gravitas that render them the languages to be added to students' language repertoires
• New Languages are usually seen as the everyday medium of communication in the community, and they may also be recognised as an effective medium of instruction in some schools.
• They are not usually taught as a target language in Australian schools - hence the asymmetry in Table 1, where New Languages do not appear in school language programs
• A significant proportion of their vocabulary is historically derived and modified from English
• Result- they might not be seen as autonomous languages, but rather as extensions of English

Additional English Information

• Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people speak English every day, and it is often their first and main language.
• Standard Australian English is one way of speaking English, which is different but still a close variety to an American or New Zealand dialect of English.
• Aboriginal English(es) and Torres Strait Islander English (ways of speaking which are recognisable, for example, by particular words, accents and cultural usages) are also spoke.
• These Englishes are valid, rule-governed varieties, and reflect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students' identities

Standard Austrlian English Usage

• Standard Australian English is not used for everyday communication in many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
• Community members speak their own language, an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language, Traditional and/or New (ecologies A or B in Table 1).
• Children's exposure to English is more like that of a foreign language; it is exclusively learned and used in the classroom at school
• People in communities will have different levels of proficiency in English, depending on their opportunities to learn and use it.
• Local educators who share students' language repertoires, like Aboriginal Language teachers, play an invaluable role due to their ability to communicate with students.

Curriculam Offerings and Resources

• Traditional Languages have a short history of being taught in schools
• Mother tongue/first languages in language ecology A began to be formally recognised by school systems from around the 1970s
• Second/additional language learning for revitalisation and revival contexts, such as those in ecologies B and C, began to be recognised by school systems around the 1990s.
• The Foundation (first year of school) - Year 10 Framework for Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2015)
• It has been in the process of being adopted/adapted and operationalised by most jurisdictions in Australia since 2016 (see Disbray, this issue).
• Represent communities' and their supporters' long-term advocacy for a place for Australian Languages in school systems.
• Protocol guides developed in each state/territory to accompany each syllabus emphasise that programs can only be implemented with local community leadership and decision-making

Language Frameworks

• All syllabuses/curricula for Australian languages have been frameworks, not language-specific plans.
• They are not differentiated according to the specific language being taught and whether the learning occurs in a language revival, first or second language learning context.
• Teachers of better-resourced languages, instantly recognize that this adds a significant level of planning responsibility to the workload of Aboriginal languages teacher

Training

• Lack of specific guidance on the expected language-specific features at each age and stage of learning for Australian languages in any ecology.
• First and second language acquisition of Australian languages is an under-researched area.
• Knowledge of forms acquired earlier or later and effective ways to order the teaching of particular language features are left to local teachers' intuitions
• there are no links to language-specific materials which develop students' proficiency in any given Australian language
• Developing teaching programs and resources for Indigenous languages is a multi-faceted task.
• Beneficial input from people with various skills and knowledge, including Elders, community members, teacher-linguists, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators.
• Many local school programs benefit from support given by teachers of other languages: they contribute pedagogical expertise that make a significant difference to the effectiveness of the programs

Teachers Views Overview

• The article will illustrate how the work is carried out by four Aboriginal teachers from 5 focal areas.
• Seeks to present how teachers manage the host of factors in their particular context.
• Data comes semistructured interviewing
• Research underpinned by existing professional relationships amongst the authors
• All of us have been on separate and overlapping journeys in the field of Indigenous languages revival and maintenance
• Angelo and Poetsch have worked as teacher-linguists, members of local language teaching teams, and university-based researchers and lecturers
• The authors approached just four people, selected for their combined ability to represent the range of ecologies we aim to illustrate.

Teacher Topics

• Each of the teachers responded to the following five topics:
• A description of the language situation in their community (including the languages the students bring to school)
• Their own role in the school program (e.g. the language/s they teach, how often, to which age groups, other staff involved)
• The kind of training and support they have had (i.e. initial teacher education and in-service teacher professional learning)
• The resources available for their languages (e.g. speakers, Elders, community expertise, teaching resources, reference materials)
• Why teaching their languages is important (from their own point of view, for students, and the community as a whole).
• Topics stimulated conversation and potential to draw out details of the ecologies.
• Each conversation (or 'yarn') lasted 30-90 minutes, and was recorded and transcribed.

Process

• Text drafted for this article was checked with each teacher, to ensure the validity of the ideas presented.
• Quotes from each teacher interview are presented below in italics and indented.
• We used 'yarning' proposed by Bessarab and Ng'andu (2010, p. 37) as an Indigenous style of conversation and story telling
• Yarning- a method for gathering information
• Bessarab and Ng'andu call narrative a counterpoint to the history of Indigenous peoples world-wide being 'over-researched'.
• Through levels of trust, it is possible to discover and learn from Indigenous peoples' experiences and insights.
• Yarning has gained recognition as a valid and distinct approach, and has been applied research approaches in the fields of Indigenous health and education
• Rigney (2006) called for Indigenist approaches to research which privilege Indigenous voices and views, arise out of social experiences that celebrate the courage and determination of Indigenous

Carmel Ryan Information

• Carmel Ryan works in ecology type A where she is an Arrernte woman who teaches her language and culture at Ltyentye Apurte on Arrernte country in Central Australia.
• Community has a population of approximately 500 and access to on-Country resources , town services in Alice Springs.
• Arrernte is one of the fewer than 15 Traditional Languages in Australia that are spoken by all generations
• Intergenerational transmission of Arrernte is fragile though, an experience of many Arrernte heritage families living in Alice Springs, where there is a linguistically heterogeneous population
• Eastern and Western Arrernte are closely related and mutually intelligible.
• There are different languages in community due to intermarriages
• The school began to include students' first language in classroom learning in the late 1970s - early 1980s
• Carmel teaches Arrernte to all students (approximately 150) School timetable includes two lessons per week in the Arrernte classroom per team

Ryan cont

• Non-Aboriginal classroom teachers join in one of these lessons each week with their students.
• Arrernte educators concerned about the possibility and risk of language shift making school program important .
• The Arrernte program is very important for the school, the community, especially for the children to keep their language and culture strong.
• Me and the assistant teachers all need to teach the kids more and more each day, making it stronger
• Arrernte room with Assistant (AT): rich oral language input for their students, grandparent generation in relation to the students in the school
• Although Carmel is a proficient speaker of her language, she also has reference material to use if needed: the comprehensive Arrernte dictionary and the picture dictionary which is also available electronically, with sound files
• The program enriches the children's first language oral and literacy skills and cultural knowledge. Periodic bush trips supplement classroom learning.
• In both contexts Carmel teaches her students about Arrernte country, their community history, connections to each other and the land, and traditional stories that convey rich ecological knowledge and social mores

History

• Carmel completed her teacher degree in the 1980s as a mature-aged student, at a time when courses with content, approaches and delivery modes more suited to students in remote locations were available
• clear bilingual schools fostered professional pathways for Aboriginal educators in the NT at this time
• remote area teacher training options were reduced
• a new partnership between Catholic Education NT and Charles Darwin University emerged in a program called 'Growing Our Own', through which Aboriginal teacher education students could still study in their home communities while working as Assistant Teachers.
• she was able to access short courses designed to develop adult first language literacy and language analysis skills
• she was also involved in the Arrernte dictionary, and translating the Bible into our language.
• courses organised by Catholic Education for language teachers in remote schools ( professional learning) She has worked with linguists and other teachers, supported through team teaching.

Marmingee Information

• Marmingee Hand is a Walmajarri speaker, who works on Bunuba Country - teaches her language and supporting Aboriginal teachers .
• Fitzroy Crossing has: population approximately 1200 people, the majority of the Aboriginal population speaks Kimberley Kriol
• students and families draw their identity from their affiliations with their Traditional Language(s), which provides a prime motivation for the school's Aboriginal language program
• Marmingee's role - involves teaching Walmajarri, coordinating the other staff involved in teaching - Walmajarri, Bunuba and Gooniyandi languages, and producing teaching resources

Hands Background

• Many Traditional Languages associated with the township of Fitzroy Crossing and the surrounding area.
• The movement of Aboriginal peoples in and around Fitzroy Crossing has changed the language ecology here dramatically over the years

-school's Aboriginal language program started in 1984 at the behest of Elders

• concerned that young people's language was starting to shift towards Kriol
• Marmingee was a lecturer/trainer when Karrayili students - a language program at taught at the school
• the first unit was to be delivered in Kriol: raise awareness that Kriol is a proper language because it is the mother tongue of most students.
• Kriol- recognizes multilingual .
• Marmingee understands how Elders had this foresight due to their own lived experiences of "coming in
• Marmingee also worked with Elders to recognise their role as Language Specialists

Teaching

• staff-program -2018 - Walmajarri
• staff for school: a generalist- has completed the Western Australian with a Traineeship

Ongoing

• Engagment- Aboriginal specilits is critical
• increase in standing!
• 1 Space where
• no English
• Kriol is ok Students more- at home and benefits are for all

Nathan Schrieber and Gunggay Details

• Nathan Schrieber teaches Gunggay language and culture on Gunggay country in his community, Yarrabah
• Yarrabah tropical Far North Queensland, near Cairns and approximately 2,500 people
• New language spoken by almost everybody here is known as Yarrie Lingo
• History-first language of the land is influenced by English
• Students still trying to track families

Background

• Nathan was undergraduate at Jamescook
• began thinking- language students
• began working- develop a school progam
• 400

Teaching

• Gungay in school for the Community
• Each prep has 1 day a year
• In the school. Assiatnts, Alfred Gray in. Research
• ongoing-
• QLD state- libary to reach

Combinding

• elders
• Nnacarow- teachier linguist
• MILE progrgam

Career

• QLD north
• networking
• resources dev from scratch.
• ility in
• building on and using his language

Michael Jarrett and Gumbaynggirr

• Michael Jarrett teaches his language on. Gumbaynggirr country on the mid-north NewSouth Wales coast.
• Michael pivotal language Nest of Aboriginal language increase existing community
• maintained 20 local
• M was a person goal teach every day
• he works on
• community

Community Overview

• Lacking knowledge
• all community .
• associate Diploma
• Masters Indigenous education.

Summary Points

• teachers is strength
• the truth -learning benefit - community community
• language, land related work is valued